Coming this fall to PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One from Harmonix and NCSoft, Fuser is the ultimate freestyle DJ simulator. It casts the player as an up-and-coming disc jockey, gives them access to over 100 pop, rap, country, and rock songs, and drops them into spectacular arenas to play a music-mixing game of Simon…
Source: Kotaku – Harmonix’s Fuser Is A Different Way To Mix Music And Gaming
Today Qualcomm is making a big step forward in its smartwatch SoC offerings by introducing the brand-new Snapdragon Wear 4100 and Wear 4100+ platforms. The new chips succeed the aging two 2018 originating Wear 3100 platforms and significantly upgrading the hardware specifications, bringing to the table all new IPs for CPU, GPU and DSPs, all manufactured on a newer lower power process node.
Source: AnandTech – Qualcomm Announces New Snapdragon Wear 4100 & 4100+: 12nm A53 Smartwatches
Though many people were first introduced to Christian Cooper via his now-viral video of a woman calling the police on him while he was birdwatching in Central Park, he has been a fixture of the birding community for years. Not only did that racist confrontation on May 25, 2020 make news, but it has also prompted more…
Source: LifeHacker – Take a Virtual Trip to Central Park to Learn About #BirdingWhileBlack
In an effort to prioritize original reporting, Facebook is updating the way it ranks news stories in its News Feed. Beginning today, Facebook will use AI to analyze groups of articles on a given topic and prioritize the ones cited most often as the o…
Source: Engadget – Facebook will prioritize original reporting in its News Feed
The Apple executive in charge of the App Store in Europe said that the company’s policies ensure a level playing field for developers and ease-of-use for customers as regulatory scrutiny over the platform mounts. From a report: “Our efforts to help developers succeed are broad, deep and ongoing, and they extend to apps — in music, email, or a variety of other categories — that compete with some aspect of our business,” Daniel Matray, the iPhone maker’s head of App Store and media services in Europe, said in a speech Tuesday at a four-day virtual conference hosted by Forum Europe. The speech comes as Apple faces antitrust probes in the European Union and U.S. over rules it imposes on developers. In particular, regulators are taking aim at the requirement that apps use the company’s in-house payment service, which takes a cut of 15% to 30% of most subscriptions and in-app purchases. Matray said that about 85% of apps it hosts don’t pay Apple a commission because they’re free or earn revenue through other means. Further reading: How Apple Stacked the App Store With Its Own Products.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Apple Executive Defends App Store Rules Scrutinized by EU and US
It’s hard to imagine living through the last few months without getting to hang out with our loved ones over video calls. We’re into the fourth month of pandemic-driven social distancing and shelter-in-place measures (though some of those are easing)…
Source: Engadget – The first commercial video call took place 50 years ago today
Does your PC seem abnormally slow or has it been acting a bit wonky as of late? There are a plethora of reasons for these kinds of symptoms—welcome to the world of Windows, and PCs in general—but one possible culprit is a recent Microsoft Edge update. It is supposed to make Edge better at what it does, though some users have reported various
Source: Hot Hardware – Windows 10 KB4559309 Update Could Be Killing System Performance, But Here’s A Fix
A prototype Lucid Air undergoing a flow visualization test at the Windshear wind tunnel facility in Concord, North Carolina. [credit:
Lucid Motors ]
A few weeks ago, we took a look at the most aerodynamically efficient vehicles ever made. At the time, the lowest-drag production car for sale in the US was the Porsche Taycan, which cuts through the air with a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.22. But the rather excellent electric Porsche won’t wear that crown for very long. Lucid Motors is readying production of its first battery electric vehicle, the Air, and it has just released the results of some wind tunnel testing. Tests at the Windshear facility in North Carolina have determined that the Air has a Cd of only 0.21.
Moving through the air as easily as possible is important if you want to travel the farthest distance using a given amount of energy. As such, optimizing a car for low drag has become more important, first as regulators in Europe demanded more efficient cars, then more recently as range has become the most important attribute of a battery electric vehicle.
“Aerodynamic efficiency plays a key role in achieving world-beating range and performance and is particularly valuable to an EV in that it provides ‘smart range’ independent of battery pack size. So naturally we intensively focused upon aerodynamics throughout the Lucid Air’s development. Our aero team worked seamlessly with design and engineering counterparts, establishing aero efficiency as a core tenet of Lucid Air from its very inception, enabling us to achieve this new standard,” said Peter Rawlinson, CEO and CTO of Lucid Motors.
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Source: Ars Technica – How’s this for aerodynamic? The Lucid Air’s drag coefficient is only 0.21
One of the security improvements being worked on in recent months by Intel’s open-source team has been FGKASLR. But how is the performance overhead compared to just traditional KASLR? Here are benchmarks looking at the performance impact of FGKASLR on top, just KASLR, and then no address space layout randomization.
Source: Phoronix – Benchmarking The Performance Overhead To Linux’s Proposed FGKASLR Security Feature
Law enforcement in America is facing a day of reckoning over its systemic, institutionalized racism and ongoing brutality against the people it was designed to protect. Virtually every aspect of the system is now under scrutiny, from budgeting and st…
Source: Engadget – ‘Predictive policing’ could amplify today’s law enforcement issues
Sharks have been terrorizing big screen beaches for decades—way more than they do in real life, actually. But in Hollywood, you have to be more than just a regular old shark to get a fin up on the humans. Sometimes, being a movie shark means you’re a smarter predator. Other times, it leads you to make very bad shark…
Source: io9 – Ranking the Shark Smarts of Horror’s Most Toothsome Predators
V1 Analytics put together this visualization of Blockbuster Video store locations in the United States between 1986 and 2019. At its peak there were 9000 Blockbuster stores globally, and now there’s only one left in Bend, Oregon. It’s kind of a strange thought, but there are people out there who have never even heard of Blockbuster Video. To them this might as well be a visualization of smallpox infections. Just some old-timey thing that came and went and now old people talk about to annoy them while they’re on TikTok.
Keep going for the full video. Some key years are 1997 when Netflix started their mail-in DVD service, 2002 when RedBox started their rental kiosks, and 2007 when Netflix started their streaming service.
Source: Geekologie – The rise and fall of Blockbuster Video stores from 1986 to 2019
Democrats unveiled a 500-page plan to address the climate crisis on Tuesday morning. Its goals include reaching 100% electric vehicles by 2035, net-zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 2040, and in all sectors by 2050. If implemented, it says it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 37% below 2010…
Source: Gizmodo – House Democrats’ Climate Plan Is Finally Here, Doesn’t Totally Suck
Enlarge / SpaceX added a new core to its fleet with the Demo-2 mission in late May. (credit: NASA)
On Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt to launch a 3.7-ton Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite for the US Air Force. This GPS III launch is scheduled to occur on a Falcon 9 rocket between 3:55pm ET and 4:10pm ET (19:56-20:10 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The launch marks the first time that SpaceX will seek to recover a booster used to launch a satellite for the US military. Although this launch was originally contracted to fly on an expendable booster, Space News reports that the US Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center agreed to revise some mission requirements so SpaceX could fly back the booster. In return, the company took “several million dollars” off the price of the launch, which was originally awarded to SpaceX in 2017 for $96.5 million.
SpaceX needs this first stage back to help balance out a busy second half of the year.
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Source: Ars Technica – For SpaceX, Falcon 9 reuse is now essential
Today only, Amazon is discounting a bunch of SanDisk storage products. The most attractive deal is the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD with 1TB for $136 — that’s $30 less than the price it normally hovers around. This is an excellent SSD with read spee…
Source: Engadget – Amazon’s one-day SanDisk sale includes off a 1TB portable SSD
Google has removed this month 25 Android apps from the Google Play Store that were caught stealing Facebook credentials. From a report: Before being taken down, the 25 apps were collectively downloaded more than 2.34 million times. The malicious apps were developed by the same threat group and despite offering different features, under the hood, all the apps worked the same. According to a report from French cyber-security firm Evina shared with ZDNet today, the apps posed as step counters, image editors, video editors, wallpaper apps, flashlight applications, file managers, and mobile games. The apps offered a legitimate functionality, but they also contained malicious code. Evina researchers say the apps contained code that detected what app a user recently opened and had in the phone’s foreground. If the app was Facebook, the malicious app would overlay a web browser window on top of the official Facebook app and load a fake Facebook login page (see image below: blue bar = actual Facebook app, black bar = phishing page).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google Removes 25 Android Apps Caught Stealing Facebook Credentials
Save up to 20% on Telescopes and Binoculars | Amazon Gold Box
Source: Gizmodo – Peer Into the Cosmos With a Beginner Telescope Kit for , Today Only
Samsung finally has an 8TB solid-state drive that’s ready for the mainstream. The company has unveiled an 870 QVO range of SSDs that ranges from ‘just’ 1TB through to the flagship 8TB capacity — enough that you may not have to worry about free space…
Source: Engadget – Samsung’s first 8TB SSD for mainstream PCs is the 870 QVO
As part of a continuing series exploring the wide world of sex toy storage options, today we’ll take a look at lockboxes that can house your collection—and keep prying eyes away 👀—when it’s not in use.
Source: LifeHacker – Figuring Out Sex Toy Storage, Part 2: Lockboxes
If you are a fan of Ubuntu, but not Gnome, you can use other Ubuntu flavors.
Source: Linux Today – Which Ubuntu Flavor Should You Choose?
